Unique Selling Propostion: Which Real Estate Ad Stands Out The Most To You?

In this post, I’d like you to take a shot at helping you analyze your ability to rank the advertisements below in an order that you feel represents, the most unique ad to the least unique ad.

This will be a two part series where in Part 1 you give me your opinion and in Part 2 I give you my opinion, along with some extra tidbits and examples that can help you come up with a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that separates your ads from the rest of your competition.

Why am I doing this?

Well, I want you to understand the necessity of choosing a USP. So many investors aren’t using this and their ads are just blending in with everyone else’s. Now that’s not to say that they’re not getting deals. Advertising works well when you are consistent. However, it works even better when you are consistently standing apart from the rest of the pack.

2 Questions To Ask Yourself When Advertising & Choosing your USP

Google allows you to advertise (Google Adwords) based upon what people are looking for. The keyword you choose should be close to what your prospect’s concern or problem is. You have to ask yourself, “What would my prospect search for, if they were in a particular situation?” Then you have to ask yourself, “How can I ensure that they see my advertisement as the solution to their problem?”

Finding the right keyword will take some research on your part, but the more thorough you are with this, the more targeted (potentially qualified) your prospect will be.

Understand that your competition will be doing the same thing. Therefore it is crucial that you stand above the crowd.

How Your Real Estate Ad Gets Ranked Amongst your Competition

Google makes you bid against your competition in order to be shown in the search results. They then rank you based upon your bid, the quality of your website, the relevancy of your ad based on the keyword search, etc. Your bid is what you would pay for each click you receive to your website. Meaning that each visitor that clicks your advertisement to go to your website, will cause you to incur a cost. If your competition bids higher, then it can cause you to get knocked of the front page of Google’s search results (which gets the most traffic).

Bidding can get very costly and can also be unpredictable depending on your competition’s activity (Which is why I’m not a big fan of Google Adwords.), so you’ll want to be sure you understand the risks involved and set a budget. I’ve seen clicks as low as .01 cent and as much as $15.00 — That’s Per Click! (Mostly legal services are that high though. FYI)

Which Ad Do You Feel Stands Out The Most?

Below are the Cost Per Click (CPC) Real Estate ad results that I found by searching for the term, “Sell My House Fast”. I put myself in a seller’s shoes and tried to think about what they might search for if they were in a situation where they needed to get their home sold now. This is a competitive keyword phrase.

All the ads below showed up along the right side of the Google search results and are in direct competition with each other. Notice how some real estate ads tend to blend in with each other and some tend to stand out. These are actual real live results, not something I made up or modified. However, I took out the websites, as they aren’t necessary for this post.

1. Need to Sell Your House?

We Buy Houses for Cash Quick Close

Any Place Any Condition Any Price

(Website Goes Here)

2. Guaranteed Home Sale

We’ll sell your home in 120 days Or buy it for cash. Guaranteed.

(Website Goes Here)

3. We Buy Houses Locally

Any Condition, Fast Cash Offer!

Get an Immediate Online Response

(Website Goes Here)

4. Sell my house fast

No Matter What Your Situation,

We Can Help. Contact Us Today!

(Website Goes Here)

5. We Buy Ugly Houses®

Sell Today in a Buyers Market with

The Original Home Buying Company!

(Website Goes Here)

6. Need to Sell Your House?

We Buy Fast in Any Condition.

Close in Days. Get Cash Offer Now!

(Website Goes Here)

7. Sell Your House in 9 Days

Get an Offer in Hours. Any Area, Condition & Price Range- Visit Now!

(Website Goes Here)

8. We Buy DC-VA-MD Houses

Cash Offer within 24 hrs. No fees.

We Buy As Is. Wash DC based.

(Website Goes Here)

Which real estate ad do you think Stands out the most?
Try to put it in order from most unique to the least unique and then come up with a brief explanation of why you feel that way.

Ex: 8,4,5,2, etc… Followed by your explanation.

I’ll give you my opinion in Part 2 which will be coming next week.

NOTE: This post is more geared towards ad writing in general and I only used Google Adwords as an example…

To Your Success,

J. Lamar Ferren

New Breed Investor

Ps. If you want to really challenge yourself, make a sample 3 line ad that you feel would be better. (Be sure to leave out your website to respect BP rules). The more people that contribute, the better it will be for all of us because we can get ideas on improving our USP. Make sure to share this with your friends so we can get a lot of input.

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About Author

J. Lamar Ferren is a 26 year old New Breed Real Estate Investor who takes down deals nationwide. Through direct response marketing he uses creative and outside the box methods, both online and offline to attract buyers, sellers, and investors.

5 Comments

Experienced exactly this problem. Been using the phrase “Sell my house fast” and struggling to get to the front page of Google due to competition. Been using Google adverts, but not much ROI unless you invest a lot of money.

Great article, USP is very important to detting yourself apartfro the crowd. Here are my picks:
8. Very targeted and straight to the point. If you are in the DC area, you’re clicking thru,
2. Again, straight to the point, they should develop their USP around the 24 hour offer, though.
5. This is the only one that has a true USP in the headline, but it’s been used and copied so much it’s beginning to lose its effectiveness. Otherwise, it would be numero uno.
7. They almost have a USP here, but needs some work.

1,3,4,6 Take your pick, Anyone of them could be the other. No differences, no USP

I think the best way to identify which are the most effective search queries is as follows, although it will take a few months to provide the results you need.

Run your seed search query through Google Adwords. This should give you a list of up to 800 relevant search queries. Set up a WordPress blog, set up Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Adsense on the blog. For each search query in your list, write a 400 word blog post.

Monitor Analytics to identify the search queries which have the highest Adsense clickthrough (you should make a little bit of money doing this), and this will give you the most effective search queries to buy in Adwords. As regards the rest of the ad wording, Google has another tool (I forget the name) which allows you to do A/B split testing to identify the most effective wording.